In addition to Wolverine and the X-Men, I've seen several other recent Marvel-licensed cartoons. And they seem to have one thing in common: they seem to have a lot of action in them. A lot of action. Iron Man: Armored Adventures and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes are pretty action-heavy shows.
But none of them are as action heavy as this one. And that's a big part of its problems.
Action shows do need action in them; that's kinda the point. But this isn't the 90's anymore; this is the post-Anime era. Anime taught western animation studios that even in action shows, you can still have serious character dynamics and development. You can have growth of a character over a season or longer. And so forth. The action should of course be there and can feed this, but ultimately, the show needs to be about characters who do actiony things, not merely gratuitous action.
The biggest example of this in recent memory is probably Avatar: The Last Airbender. For all of its sometimes childishness, it really pushed character hard. You can date an episode of the show by how characters interact. Sokka being a buffoon that's barely tolerated by everyone else? Must be early season 1. Sokka being the de-facto leader that the group more or less respects? Definitely season 3. And so on.
Those other two shows I mention do have quite a bit of character to them. And that's where Wat XM falls apart in comparison: it doesn't. Why? My take: too much action.
The ratio of action scenes per episode in this show is absolutely staggering. Excluding the three-part season finale (which would skew the results, being the season finale), I get an average of ~2.04 action scenes per episode. That's an action scene every 10 minutes. And if you assume that action scenes require on average 3 minutes to complete, you're looking at reducing the time for non-action parts of every episode by 6 minutes. So down to 16 minutes per episode.
That's not a lot of time.
Even ignoring the character issue, one thing this non-stop onslaught of action does is make it really hard to see where the big episodes are. You know its an important episode in Avatar when you get a lot of fights. Less important episodes have less fighting. Here? Yes, the big, pivotal episodes have lots of fighting. But there many episodes that have wall-to-wall action that are completely irrelevant, like Hunting Grounds or eXcessive Force. Important episodes should be where you have your action-fests, not random character pieces.
The main thing is this: by spending so much time on action, there is a lot less time for actual character development. So there isn't much of any.
Of the X-Men, there are four that are reasonably detailed: Wolverine, Scott, Emma, and Nightcrawler. Of these, only one is subject to any real character development. Scott never really changes during the course of the series. We get to see different facets of Kurt's personality, but that's not development so much as establishment.
And the sad thing about Emma is... her only real development is falling for Scott. Yes, we learn a lot more about her, but ultimately she was always on the good side. Her friends not so much, but she was always doing the right thing. Character development is a character changing, not just the audience learning more about her. Emma's feelings for Scott seem to come out of nowhere; there is never any explanation for why she cares about him specifically, save a single, forgotten line. And even that doesn't really clear much up on that score.
Logan is the title character; this is his show. And yet he's completely one-dimensional as a character. He never grows into his leadership role over the course of the series. He never becomes more responsible. He never learns more about trusting people or whatever. Logan at the start of the series is the same as at the end of it. He may get a lot of backstory and such, but none of that actually matters or makes his character more dynamic.
Why does this happen? I can't say for certain. But when your series spends roughly 27% of every episode on action, there's a good chance that opportunities for character development were lost.
But it's more than that. It isn't just the quantity of the action; it's the quality.
In Wat XM, action scenes rarely make attempts to reveal character. Especially in the early part of the series, action scenes just sort of exist. Look at Overflow (the first appearance of Storm); the entire last act is an extended action sequence. As far as character moments go, we get a bit from Scott and Logan, and some from Emma. But really, you could have said the same things about their characters in half that time. Or even better, do more with those characters in the same time. Take eXcessive Force, where Scott goes on a rampage. While that told us lots about Scott as a character, it didn't need to last as long as it does. We got the point 10 minutes in; after that, the action was just gratuitous.
So it's not just the amount of time spent on action; it's the poor use of available opportunities. Avatar was much better about using fight scenes as a way to provide character and information. For example, take the way that Katara learns waterbending in Season 1. Yes, her fight with Pakku is absurd, but there was still a gradual build-up of her skills and complexity in waterbending throughout the season before that. There was no need to say how that was happening; we knew it was because she was practicing with the previously established scroll. And we even see her practicing every now and then in the background.
Wat XM never really gets the idea of using action to explain character. I mentioned in my look at Overflow how Emma actions could have been so much stronger if they emphasized how much more powerful the Shadow King was than herself. This happens frequently in the show, where action scenes have the potential for characterization, but rarely every takes advantage of it. So many action scenes are just... generic fighting stuff.
And this is most egregious in the major battles that they undertake. In Avatar, if there's a big fight going on, there is usually also big character stuff going on too. That's one of the major flaws with The Drill: there's no real character on display from anyone; it's just a fight. Using The Crossroads of Destiny as a comparison would be just unfair, so I'll take Siege of the North instead. This is a major episode, involving both of the Season 1 villains. There is a lot of character here, and much of it is told through action. The way Aang throws himself at the Fire Nation armada. The Zuko/Katara fight, pushing forward on Zuko's determination. It's not as well done as later episodes, but it works.
Compare this to Battle Lines, the first major plot-episode of the show (notably happening halfway through the series). It has character stuff in it. Rogue comes back and the trust issues crop up. But once the fight starts... all that just goes away. Granted Siege of the North is a 2-part season finale, so compare it to Foresight. This episode has a full three parts, but it doesn't do nearly as much as Siege of the North's 2-parts (and that had an entire plot-arc that was superfluous). There are fight scenes in Foresight, but they rarely do anything with the characters. You see Storm doing stuff, Bobby doing stuff, Kitty doing stuff, etc, but none of it is particularly revealing about their characters.
It's not just that 27% of every episode is action. It's that the writers rarely take the opportunity use that 27% to actually have characters. It's like they go into "action mode;" once that happens, all character is shut off.
Then again, they weren't doing so hot with characters in non-action mode either.
If you think I'm slamming the series for weak characterization too much, consider this. Of the three elements of narrative, character is the one that television does best. Good character in movies is hard to achieve simply due to the limited running time. TV shows have hours and hours to deal with character.
Even compared to books, TV has some advantages in the presentation of characters. The episodic nature of television along with the long format allow you to spend entire episodes focused on a single character. And since each episode can have its own rising action and climax (unlike books, which have to pick something and focus on it), it allows even side characters to have deeper arcs than most novels could actually pull off without breaking the pacing of the work.
That's one of the reasons for this modern Anime-influenced animation era: Anime, by and large, focuses on characters. Sure, they have action elements and visual style and so forth, but in the end, it all comes down to long-format storytelling about characters. That's one of the reasons why Avatar: The Last Airbender, despite being Strictly Formula in terms of plot, is widely regarded as one of the best western animation serieses of the last decade.
Consider this. Wolverine and the X-Men is being consistently beaten in characterization and character depth... by My Little Pony. The bar has clearly been raised for characters in animation. This sort of thing might have flown back in the 80s and 90s (though even the 90's X-Men series did characterization better, even just looking at the first season), but not today.
